Digital Frontrunner Roundtable III

WHAT ARE THE SKILLS AND WHERE ARE THE JOBS OF TOMORROW? A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY / MULTI-STAKEHOLDER HALF-DAY CONVERSATION

Revolution!

Like teenagers, young technologies live in a world of experiment, trial and error, and unreliability. But at some point, as they mature, technologies, like young adults, will have a coming-of-age moment. They become reliable and capable, and are embraced as such by the wider world. The problems they were created to solve disappear and cease even to be interesting. Who, at least in the developed world, worries about the once daunting problems solved by plumbing, and the electric light? Digital innovation is having its coming-of-age moment. Its capacity to apply something approaching human-level intelligence to an increasing number of complex tasks heralds a profound change to the world of work. Its ability to support almost any kind of communication, transaction, and collaboration—and over any distance—is changing the whole meaning of what it is to be a corporate organisation. How do we want to live in this new world? Can we predict the jobs of the future and the skills they will need? Should we try to preserve or reinstate the traditional model of the firm, the firm’s relationships with its employees, and the prospect of long-term stable employment? Or should we accept change as inevitable and begin the work of imagining how as our civilisation enters a new era it will remain, above all, civilised?

The Roundtable

The roundtable will begin with three 15-minute talks. The first by Tim Hwang, Counsel at Google's Policy unit in Mountain View and responsible for coordinating the company's global policy work surrounding artificial intelligence and virtual reality; the second by Dr. Ville-Veikko Pulkka, of the University of Helsinki who will discuss Finland's basic income experiment in the context of the digital economy, and the third by Dr. Chinchih Chen, Postdoctoral Researcher of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment at the Oxford Martin School whose most recent publication (with Carl Benedikt Frey and Thor Berger) is "Drivers of Disruption? Estimating the Uber Effect".